If you study blogging, which I did once upon a time, I hit upon a lot of people who tell you exactly how to blog effectively.
That’s wonderful. I’ve studied it, and I kind of know how to do it. I’ve seen results from doing it, but it’s not my preferred method. Hence the folksy style I’m using right now, which is pretty much my casual voice.
I just needed a break, from the intense infomercial voice you have to adopt for professional blogging. I’m just tired right now. Very busy two weeks in my job, and it’s left me tired. I just wanted a week off from blogging about writing. And of course, once I’m Mr. Best Selling Author, readers are going to want to go back through my blog posts, and they’re not going to want to read 5 Easy Hacks to Writing About Lemonaid. (”Number one, Dell’s Lemonaid…”)
They’re going to want to read about, “how did you come up with The Bottom of The Ocean?” and find a blog post about it (”Hey, you ever go under the ocean water when you were a kid, and see the ocean stretch off for miles, and you ever wished you could just walk out and see the very bottom? That’s how I came up with the idea…”)
And of course, I’ll have to admit it was watching a Bear Grylls episode where he was doing free diving that was the catalyst for me to write it.
Yup. The first scene I wrote – even before I wrote out the plot sheets – was the scene where Blake leaves the lab and goes into the ocean, leaving the surface world behind.
Or of course, how did I come up with Rise of The Romli? See, there was this kid who lived on Wesley Street behind me, and he had the Star Fleet Technical Manual back in 1977. It had just come out. So I’d bought it a couple of months later. And I went through every page, ooh-ing and ahh-ing until I hit the last page of the starships, and I saw the Dreadnought.
Wow.
Okay.
We’re fighting the Romulans.
So, that’s my infamous first book that I tried and never finished. To finish that book last year was a huge thing for me. Alas, I may not be able to publish it, simply because it’s not a Kirk or Picard or Janeway book.
By the way, I’m not a Trekkie. I’m a Trekker, the proper designation. And I’ve never seen Deep Space 9, I’ve never seen any of the TV series except TOS and the first half of TNG’s first season. I’m a TOS fan, bottom line. TNG was really bad. Mind Achingly bad. I suppose it got better, but I didn’t stick around to find out, when the TOS movies were so much better.
Where did I come up with Ramaar? Easy. In one of the Behind the Scenes books of Star Trek there was Roddenberry’s official description of the Romulans. At the same time, Diane Duane wa writing her Romulan books and… there was a MASSIVE discrepancy. I read her books and yes… she did a good job.
They just weren’t Romulans! They didn’t canonically fit into the Star Trek Universe at all! So, I wrote a novel about Ramaar. I really dealt with his father more, and in that novel his father did ascend the throne as Praetor. Dramatically, this left me more copying Dune than Star Trek, and I ditched the novel right away.
Lohman. I have to say, I wanted him to be the quintessential Star Trek fan boy who does a prank and ends up Captain of a star ship by accident. As I wrote the book, it changed rapidly. Anyone who could design a starship overnight had to be brilliant – and Lohman had definite ideas on how the ships should be used. I borrowed Vance Davidson from reality, and his widow gave me permission to include him. I really wanted to get some video of Vance so I could incorporate his quirks but didn’t want to bother his family for it. Suffice it to say, I involved him as the Smart admiral who supports the Dreadnoughts.
When did I come up with Lohman being Kirk’s son? Last month, actually. I began to write the sequel, and the idea for the prequel as a short story came up. As I wrote the prequel, I was simultaneously writing the sequel. Spock’s meeting with Lohman was written the day before I wrote the sequel scene where Spock tells Lohman he is Kirk’s son.
I know that David was Kirk’s son, but he was so obviously his mother’s son, it was like he was Kirk in name only. The only Kirk-like thing about him led to his death. The idea of Lohman being a Kirk fan to finding out he actually was Kirk’s son appealed to me. Especially since I have a Captain Kirk kind of dad myself. I wanted Lohman to be more the kind of son we would expect from Kirk – impetuous.
It’s obvious from the 80’s movies that most of the Starfleet rank and file regarded the Enterprise crew with Awe. So, Lohman’s personality would lead him to tell the Academy that he planned on being the next Kirk. He would be laughed at, and of course, being Lohman, that would just goad him on.
Did Scotty know Lohman was Kirk’s son? No, he just knew Lohman looked something like Kirk, and there were several times Scotty comments on Lohman having the same mannerisms. That ended up morphing into the present story line. Whether they will get published or not, we’ll see. Right now, the rules are strictly against publishing books on “new characters and new ships.” Why? The public doesn’t want to read them. I will say that Vonda Mcintyre’s Dreadnought book was one of the better Star TRek books, and John M. Ford’s Klingon book was well done also.
Maybe they should rethink those policies.
Anyway, enough rambling about my books for today!
